My Mother in Three Pieces

Content warning: suicidal ideation

i.

A knock on the door. My mother told me not to answer; it was the gypsies; she said, hush and stay quiet. But I didn't, and a woman came in and sat down and demanded food. My mother took a boiled potato, put it on a plate, poured some olive oil and a handful of salt on it. The old woman ate quickly, only a few bites barely chewed and quickly swallowed and that potato was gone, skin and all, and I couldn't take my eyes off her, her layers of dull clothes, her heavy shawl, the red bandana that cut off her forehead. My mother had to leave the room, and the woman poured the oil into a can in the deep pocket of her apron; as she was stealing the fork, my mother came back and yelled at her. She stood up hissing, and she stared at me as she walked out, and I wanted to go with her.

ii.

I took a knife to bed with me. I had told everyone that I would kill myself on my ninth birthday. And, since I had told everyone I was going to do this thing, I felt compelled to follow through. But the knife was dull (even though my mother used it to cut everything), and I didn't know how hard a breastbone is, and I just couldn't do it for whatever reason. But that knife, dull as it was, pierced my thigh as I brought it away from my chest. And I liked the way that felt, how I could feel a faint pulse, and how certain and clean and undemanding it was. In the moonlight, the blood looked dark, and I rubbed it between my fingers, making them dark too.

iii.

I brought my daughter home, my mother stayed for weeks, so eager to care for such a pure new thing which she swathed in homemade crocheted clothing and handled with such softness and delicacy and looked at with soft eyes. But then the days wore on and I watched her hands and her eyes, and I felt the change (that other daughter she had buried). And so she became sharper. And her hands were never still, and eyes were always looking for something else. When she left, walking down the airport terminal, and I was holding my daughter, I finally felt her shroud, too heavy for the tiny beings she was leaving behind.